C4 Engine Drops Linux Support, Calls It "Frankenstein OS"

[TheBlackCat]

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. More like "terrible at marketing", which is especially bad when the competition is the opposite. Like I said, I am sure it will be straightened out. Personally I don't care much either way, Linux support is not going to bring many customers to a game or to an engine.

This isn't a question of marketing, or a question of Linux, it is a question of reliability. If you are completely dependent on a single developer, that developer has a history of temper tantrums, and that developer has a history of removing features and changing licensing rules based on those temper tantrums, how can you trust that developer enough to make your product dependent on him?

Sure, it was something you don't care so much about this time, but what about next time? What if he gets pissed off at steam and changes the license rules to forbid that users of his engine distribute their games on steam? What if he rage quits Intel and decides to remove support for inlet graphics? You are making your business dependent on his whims, and next time his whims might be about something that affects you much more.

You are somehow convinced that he will change his mind in the future, but what if you had a release coming up and you were planning on using whatever it is he decided to remove? Would you be happy about letting your release date slip while you waited an unknown time for him to calm down, or about having to drop features you had promised your customers?

And all of that is ignoring having such a critical, low-level component with a bus factor of 1.

I am a scientist, not a commercial developer. I don't have to please customers and I don't have release dates. However, even I am careful about basing my work too heavily on a project with too small a bus factor, or developers with unpredictable whims, or on a project that has a history of removing features with no warning and no recourse, or that has a history of arbitrarily changing licensing rules.

[Kano]

@Adarion

Static builds do NOT help, they can never use system libs. In order to let gallium drivers run that are compiled on a different system than the Steam runtime you have to delete some files only. Btw. SteamOS never tries to use Radeon/Nouveau oss drivers, they have got a very simple hardware detection, like if VGA vendor=AMD use fglrx. The problem does not happen with Intel (as not gallium based) nor with binary drivers.

But I would really like to know which hardware he wanted to use for install and why he deleted the huge amount of 2000 lines of code. Maybe he should begin again with a cleaner implementation, as he has got OpenGL because there is no Mac with D3D, so maybe he has issues with inputdevices/sound.

[Shoost]

more on this later in my comment



so, dismissing platform is topnotch? @.@"

:lol:

One emotional outburst and you dismiss a developer forever? Well, you will have to stop using all software. Starting with anything Linus ever touched.

at one side you invite and in same breath you don't care? @.@"

I personally don't care for my own project. He's not going to get many people coming due to linucks, but something is better than nothing and he already got a few. I am pretty certain he will support it on another distro now that he's got better advice.

now, let's see
basing your bread and butter project on work done by one developer when that developer can have whims like discontinuing whole platform?

I own quite a few game engines that have been discontinued for ALL platforms :lol:

Or like Ogre they exist in terrible zombie state of rot and decay.

There's only one platform that matters if you want to make desktop game, windoze. Of if you are a cell phone game making retard, you have to deal with crapple.

The rest are just some fantasy/gimmick. If you were the only decent paid engine supporting Linux then you could rake in some customers, but now even valve is going there so it's way too late to develop a big loyal following.

one would have to be insane to bet on that horse. not only you risk on getting burned late in the project, you risk your time and investment.

Your time and monetary investment are always at risk, maybe even more so when you rely on a big corporation. Fortunately C4 would never completely fold as Mr. Lengyel can always go back to contracting in gaming industry part time if necessary. Tons of work gets done on the engine. Most of the ones that don't have corporate funding have an initial burst of development, then rot, then disappear.

whim like that is not "terrible at marketing", that is childish and immature case of handling business without one shred of thought what some move means for your customers.

Dropping support five customers care about is totally the end of the world :lol:

The bad at marketing part is the admittedly dumb way he dropped the news. As it turns out there was no real reason to drop support anyway, he just is not very familiar with linucks and did not ask around on the forums to get some help.

how can anyone be stupid to bet on something so unreliable when you have choices like Source or Unreal?

Great idea I never thought of that I'll just go and play all those cool games made by indies with those. Oh wait. Pretty much useless/pipedream options unless you have a big budget. If you don't then if you are making casual or cell phone game you would probably go to unity, and if you prefer C++ and not to have Unity eventually jack up prices like mad or go out of business from being unable to support their 300+ employees (or if you dislike communist feminist hipsters from sweden :lol then you choose C4.

also, even considering this engine for Linux now would just contribute to what author thinks about Linux when he talks about things not working. he is obviously not willing to make it work.

Turns out it works fine, he just got tired of wasting time on Ubuntu constantly. People forget what a giant time waster Linux can be. If you are just using it for one thing it gets hard to justify spending all that time on it. But Ubuntu is not the only option.

so, why add another things for users to have problems with?

Looks like he will be supporting it through another distro, it was just a bit of an outburst. When you don't have 50 PR monkeys to spin your words sometimes they don't come out very friendly. You are way too emotional about it. I don't care if he's secretly a nazi cannibal (though I'm sure he's not) the engine itself is what matters.

[Shoost]

This isn't a question of marketing, or a question of Linux, it is a question of reliability. If you are completely dependent on a single developer, that developer has a history of temper tantrums, and that developer has a history of removing features and changing licensing rules based on those temper tantrums, how can you trust that developer enough to make your product dependent on him?

Sure, it was something you don't care so much about this time, but what about next time? What if he gets pissed off at steam and changes the license rules to forbid that users of his engine distribute their games on steam? What if he rage quits Intel and decides to remove support for inlet graphics? You are making your business dependent on his whims, and next time his whims might be about something that affects you much more.

You are somehow convinced that he will change his mind in the future, but what if you had a release coming up and you were planning on using whatever it is he decided to remove? Would you be happy about letting your release date slip while you waited an unknown time for him to calm down, or about having to drop features you had promised your customers?

And all of that is ignoring having such a critical, low-level component with a bus factor of 1.

I am a scientist, not a commercial developer. I don't have to please customers and I don't have release dates. However, even I am careful about basing my work too heavily on a project with too small a bus factor, or developers with unpredictable whims, or on a project that has a history of removing features with no warning and no recourse, or that has a history of arbitrarily changing licensing rules.

The only bad part here is the way the post came out, which was not tactful.

The only stuff he ever dropped support for was some incredibly old ATI cards and that got more of an outrage on the forums than this did. A guy had to be banned IIRC. And this was incredibly old ATI cards much older than anyone else supports.

You don't have to worry about customers and you also don't have to worry about the bills. You aren't bleeding money every time you waste a couple hours dicking around with some random OS.

[asavah]

Meh.
What's C4 engine? First time I hear about it.
Can anyone name *3* AAA games built on top of that crap?
That dev *needs* an urgent job change, I suggest janitor.

[GreatEmerald]

25% off the top is not really workable. If you sell a game in a store you don't even get 25% of the net yourself. So unless you have a half million to a million to get a 'real' license you are out of luck. It's also not that easy to do everything with Unreal you might want to do, and you are at the mercy of some megacorporation's whim. If they don't want to support you or don't want your business any more or fold up/merge to EA or Activision, you are out of luck.

It's 5%. 5, not 25. That's very workable.
And no, you're not at the mercy of any megacorporation's whim. You subscribe and you get the source code, and you can do whatever you want with it (within the confines of the quite reasonable EULA). It has Linux support now, and if you subscribe, you get Linux support for as long as you want to keep that version, at the very least. They can fold up and you will keep that version of the engine. There's nothing they can do to prevent you from using it. And Epic being a megacorporation makes it certain that they won't act on a whim, but rather consider all their clients who depend on their technology; not to mention that they actively accept pull requests from their subscribers and encourage, not discourage, sharing code between different projects.

[V10lator]

https://twitter.com/EricLengyel/stat...87074370039808 <- That sounds more like failing hardware than a Linux issue to me. Why should a system, without even the slightest change, suddenly fail at booting?

[Shoost]

It's 5%. 5, not 25. That's very workable.
And no, you're not at the mercy of any megacorporation's whim. You subscribe and you get the source code, and you can do whatever you want with it (within the confines of the quite reasonable EULA). It has Linux support now, and if you subscribe, you get Linux support for as long as you want to keep that version, at the very least. They can fold up and you will keep that version of the engine. There's nothing they can do to prevent you from using it. And Epic being a megacorporation makes it certain that they won't act on a whim, but rather consider all their clients who depend on their technology; not to mention that they actively accept pull requests from their subscribers and encourage, not discourage, sharing code between different projects.

If they stop supporting it, it's completely useless to you for the future.

http://devmaster.net/devdb/engines/the-nebula-device-2

You can go use nebula engine 2. Perfectly free and open source, lots of AAA games made on it. Wonder why no one does. Because it's worthless without support. You may as well make your own engine as try to keep Unreal up to date from an old branch once you can't get updates. Not to mention no 'little things' like direct support.

I have an old unreality engine copy on a cd somewhere for that matter.

[Shoost]

those screens look like games did like ... around the original HL2, so 10 years ago?

You can't get AAA looks without spending millions on art. Rendering of the engine is fantastic. Never seen any artifacts or glitches which is not the case for most engines.

[r_a_trip]

I would love that all people were able to use linux as easily as other 2 major desktop OSes. Hope you people share my view.

They can't use those other OSes easily either. Most people get them preloaded and preconfigured and most of them (that I've met) are terrified of the prospect of something going wrong. They are fsck'ed if it does, because those friendly computer repair shops charge an arm and a leg to solve whatever (minor) problem has occured.

The kind of utterly frustrating problems that Windows has, simply don't occur under Linux. E.g. the prospect of downloading something under Windows scares even me. I just can't be certain if something uninvited is piggybacking its way onto the machine. With Linux the chances of me actively setting a "nasty" executable and running it, is a lot smaller.

Is Linux trouble free? No, far from it, but comparing a preloaded, next-next-finish, Windows appliance machine with a user installed Linux distro is comparing apples and oranges. Give an end user a no OS machine and a Windows installation thumbdrive and see how easy Windows really is.